‘Arco’ Review: An Animated Fable Ready to Break (and Heal) Your Heart
4.5/5 robots named Mikki.
When I was a small child, my mom had to stop me from jumping out of a window. Not for any dark or reckless reasons, but because I had watched Kiki’s Delivery Service so much, I was convinced that I could fly. The way it was portrayed onscreen — the weightlessness, the sense of possibility, the assurance that I would land safely even if I didn’t know that that wasn’t realistically or logically possible — had all burrowed into my brain.
Decades later, now with a bit more wisdom and a pathological fear of falling, I was reminded of that burrowed feeling while watching Arco. The recently-Academy Award-nominated film from French director Ugo Bienvenu puts its own spin on the cinematic magic of flying, all while telling a fable that will simultaneously make your heart break and soar.
Arco centers, in part, around its titular protagonist (voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi): a young boy growing up in a futuristic city among the clouds in the year 2932. Arco is too young to join his family as they use rainbow-colored suits to travel through time… but that doesn’t stop him from stealing the technology and going off on his own, anyway. He accidentally ends up in the year 2075, meets a lonely girl named Iris (voiced by Romy Fay), and they begin to devise a way to get him home.
What unfolds from there could easily be compared to the aforementioned Kiki’s Delivery Service and the larger works of Studio Ghibli, and even a bit of E.T., The Extra Terrestrial. But within that sense of familiarity is something incredibly unique. Any tropes that might veer towards predictability still land in an impactful way, and there are layers to the story’s grasp on loneliness and connection and possibility.
Mikki the Robot, I Love You!
It also helps that the visuals of Arco are gorgeous, in a way that feels fitting for the rainbows at the center of the film’s subject, without just defaulting to obvious rainbow-hued aesthetic choices. The flying sequences are dizzying and stunning, with a sense of magical realism that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
At first, I was worried that the dubbed voice cast of mostly-household names would start to distract from that magic. But again: that familiarity only ended up transforming into something beautiful. A subplot involving the trio of Dougie (Will Ferrell), Stewie (Andy Samberg), and Frankie (Flea), three mysterious men in neon-hued outfits who want to investigate Arco’s arrival, devolves into both levity and a charming emotional beat.
But to me, the most profound casting decision arrived in the form of Iris’ distant parents, voiced by Natalie Portman (who is one of the film’s producers) and Mark Ruffalo. Their performances would have already injected enough emotion into the proceedings… but the choice is also made for them both to voice an additional role. Mikki, the family’s robot nanny with a stature equal parts G.I. Robot and Robby from The Forbidden Planet, is voiced by Bienvenu himself in the French dub of the movie. But in this version, both Ruffalo and Portman’s voices are layered over each other, creating a tonal dissonance that only becomes more bizarre and beautiful as the film goes along.
It also becomes a pretty loaded sentiment for Mikki’s role in Iris’ life: as a physical extension of her absentee parents, and of the idealized version of them that could be in her life in a different set of circumstances. Without giving away any further spoilers, it’s a inspired choice that not only leads to one of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments, but that made me soften my stance on watching subbed vs. dubbed foreign films.
By the time I got to the last few scenes of Arco, I found that the movie had taken my breath away. Not because of the stunning flying sequences, but because of the poignant emotional core, which delivers a loaded life-affirming wallop that needs to be seen to be believed. There’s no telling if Arco will win the Oscar in such an already-stacked year, but I’m glad that (like its protagonist) the movie is crash-landing into our lives at exactly the right time.
Arco will debut nationwide in theaters on Friday, January 30th.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
